The Longest War (50 page)

There were four approaches on the table: first, the “stay the course” option of continuing the strategy that was clearly failing; second, the State Department’s “targeted” approach, which was to focus on al-Qaeda in Iraq but not expand the American role further; third, the “double down” option, which was the surge; and fourth, “bet on Maliki,” the Iraqi prime minister who was telling Bush administration officials that he wanted to clamp down on the sectarian violence that elements of his own government were fueling, but that he did not have the forces to do it.

These options were considered at four formal meetings of the National Security Council with the president during the first week of December. The CIA had an important input in this process because when it forecasted what would happen to the Iraqi military in the event of a reduced American role,
the Agency found a very high level of risk that the Iraqi army would fracture along sectarian lines. Bush said, “I’m not taking that risk.” McGurk recalls, “That’s when the debate started to shift towards ‘we’re going to have to do something here.’” Over the course of the rest of December that “something” became a mix of the surge and betting on Maliki.

Meanwhile, at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) think tank in Washington, D.C., a home to Laurie Mylroie and many of the other leading advocates of the war in Iraq, the historian Fred Kagan, whose academic specialty is the Napoleonic wars, was becoming increasingly frustrated at the tenor of the debate in Washington, which seemed more about managing an exit from Iraq than actually winning the war. In the fall of 2006, Kagan and some of his think tank colleagues decided to set up their own planning exercise to work out what number of additional troops in Iraq might put what Kagan termed a “
tourniquet
” on the bloody civil war.

At AEI’s office near the White House, Kagan convened a number of Iraq experts and, crucially, American officers who were veterans of Iraq to work through the planning exercise. Kagan’s research team used open-source reporting and Google maps of Iraq to construct “heat maps” of where the violence was most intense to determine where additional American boots on the ground could make the most difference. To make the exercise even more realistic they used the army’s own “
force generation
” model, the briefing slide which someone had helpfully posted on Wikipedia so that their recommendations could be matched by the Army’s actual capability to generate new forces. Kagan recalls, “The slide was on Wikipedia, it was unbelievable. We did a little bit of diligent calling to make sure it was accurate, but it was.”

Using the Army’s force-generation model, the AEI exercise came to the conclusion that five Army combat brigades and two Marine regiments were available to reverse Iraq’s descent into chaos, almost exactly the troop increase that President Bush would announce a month later. Kagan says, “I don’t know that I ever gave this more than a thirty or forty percent chance of succeeding. The only argument that I made was that the consequences of all of the alternative strategies that were being proposed were so unacceptable that it was worth trying.”

Kagan and his team turned the conclusions of the planning exercise into a PowerPoint presentation, and on December 11 he and Jack Keane, the retired four-star general, went to brief Vice President Cheney about its findings. Cheney did not show his hand during the meeting. Kagan says, “He
is a Sphinx
. He was asking good questions, but we didn’t have a particular takeaway from that meeting; one never does.”

Before the meeting Keane had had a long discussion with Lieutenant General Raymond Odierno, the newly arrived number-two military commander in Iraq, an officer whom he had mentored over the course of many years. Odierno and his boss, General Casey,
fundamentally disagreed
about how many more American boots on the ground were needed in Iraq. Casey would only accept two brigades while Odierno wanted five and, in addition, two Marine battalions. This was almost exactly what the AEI exercise had independently determined to be a plausible number to help reverse the momentum of the civil war.

On December 11,
Bush also met privately
with a number of outside experts, including General Keane, Stephen Biddle, and Eliot Cohen, who were advocating major changes in the way that the war was being fought. Collectively they made the case that the Iraq strategy needed to be changed; new leadership had to be installed to implement that strategy, specifically to replace General Casey, and more troops were needed.

Biddle recalls that the White House meeting was “
unbelievably somber
; the president looked depressed to me. The setting around the room was maybe not quite funereal, but the impression I got was that whatever you thought of this administration before, they looked like a bunch of people who were staring into the abyss, and had made the decision that they were looking at a failed war with potentially grave, cataclysmic consequences, and had come up full-stop against the reality that there weren’t any really appealing options at the moment, and that the consequences of failure were very high.”

Cohen had published
Supreme Command: Soldiers, Statesmen, and Leadership in Wartime
in 2002. The book argued that to win a war civilian leaders sometimes had to get really involved in the nitty-gritty details of how to conduct it. Now Cohen urged the president to do just that, something he had tried to articulate at a previous meeting with Bush at Camp David some months earlier: “When I left that first meeting in June, I felt as if I’d pulled my punches a little bit, which is hard not to do when you’re meeting with the president of the United States.” This time was going to be different. Cohen’s son was deploying to Iraq, “and that gave me the steel that I needed. And so I was really quite direct.… Although I like Casey as a human being, I thought you had to get rid of him, and I said you have to put in Petraeus. And
I was very blunt
about it.”

Keane says, “
We got around
to talking about a potential successor to Casey; we all agreed that Petraeus was the guy.” Bush’s reaction to this, according to Biddle, was “‘How am I supposed to know that this guy is a great general and that guy’s a poor general?’ He didn’t feel like he had the knowledge space required to make decisions about which general to back in a war like this. At the time he was clearly very uncomfortable with this, and yet that’s ultimately exactly what he did. For all intents and purposes, he fired Casey. He kicked him upstairs, but his tour ended early.”

Keane addressed the president directly, saying, “We don’t have a military strategy to defeat the insurgency.” Keane recalls that the president “didn’t say anything, but his nonverbal reaction, I could tell that
he was quizzical
about it. He asked very few questions of any of us, but I sensed something. And then I went on to lay out what we needed to do, which was a counterinsurgency strategy designed to protect the people. I said the center of gravity is Baghdad; the enemy has chosen that as its center of gravity, and that has to be where we start. We don’t have to do all of Baghdad, and some of what I presented I took from the AEI analysis. I said, ‘We’re dealing with a city of five to six million people. And we’ve got to demonstrate that we’re gonna protect the Shias and the Sunnis, and we’re gonna be equitable about it. So we should start with the mixed Sunni-Shia neighborhoods.’” Keane explained that this approach would be costly: “‘This is a military counteroffensive, and as a result of that casualties are going to rise, because the level of violence is going to go up. But if we are right, and I believe we are, then the casualties will eventually not only go down; they’ll drop dramatically.’ And I told them this was twelve to eighteen months duration, closer to eighteen, not to twelve.”

As the White House was secretly considering the surge, on December 6 the congressionally mandated bipartisan
Iraq Study Group
released its keenly awaited report. Headed by former secretary of state James Baker, the Bush family’s most faithful ally in the Republican Party, and Lee Hamilton, the longtime former Democratic chair of the House Foreign Relations Committee, the Iraq Study Group’s report arrived with a considerable splash in Washington. The report made the observation that the situation in Iraq was “grave and deteriorating,” which few could quibble with, but it was nonetheless strong language coming from Baker, given his decades-long close friendship with the president’s father. And the report urged that the “Iraqi government should accelerate assuming responsibility for Iraqi security by
increasing the number and quality of Iraqi Army brigades. While this process is under way, and to facilitate it, the United States should significantly increase the number of U.S. military personnel, including combat troops, imbedded in and supporting Iraqi Army units.” The report argued that with this approach most combat brigades could be out of Iraq by early 2008.

The Iraq Study Group endorsed a key element of what the Bush administration had already been doing for the past three years—“standing up” the Iraqi security forces—while giving a sop to those who wanted more troops sent to Iraq, but only in the form of trainers for the Iraqi army, and simultaneously giving a lukewarm endorsement to a drawdown over the course of the next eighteen months. While these were, of course, all desirable
goals
, as a strategy for success in Iraq, as the violence peaked there during the winter of 2006, this advice was a muddle. It was a predictable muddle because a successful strategy to prosecute a complex war was unlikely to be generated by a committee of Democratic and Republican elder statesmen, no matter how wise. O’Sullivan recalls her reaction to these recommendations: “
If we do this
, on the timeline they’re suggesting, we’re going to lose. And really badly. The Baker-Hamilton approach looked very much like where we wanted to be in Iraq, but it wasn’t where we were.” National Security Advisor Steve Hadley privately referred to the Baker-Hamilton report as a “dog’s breakfast,” while President Bush “hated it.… He saw it as calling for a withdrawal,” according to Brett McGurk, the NSC staffer.

For the surge to work Bush had to enlist the support of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the six senior officers who head the military services, who were generally opposed to sending five more brigades to Iraq.
On December 13
, Bush made a rare visit to the secure Joint Chiefs conference room at the Pentagon known as “the tank.” He came armed with some “sweeteners,” including larger budgets and an expansion of the Army and Marine Corps, and he brushed aside concerns advanced by some of the chiefs about the Iraq War’s strain on the ground forces and the depletion of America’s strategic reserve.

Hadley recalls
that the meeting with the Joint Chiefs was critical to moving the surge forward: “If the president had just decided, without going through this process, and bringing the military on board, you would have had a split between the president and his military in wartime. Not good. That’s a constitutional crisis. But more to the point, Congress—who did not like the surge and was appalled that the president would do this—would have brought forward all those military officers who’d had any reservation about the surge in
order to defeat it. And the president would have announced his surge, but he’d have never gotten it funded.”

The new defense secretary, Robert Gates, who had been a member of the Iraq Study Group before his appointment to run the Pentagon, met Lieutenant General Odierno in Baghdad on December 19 and for the first time a senior American military commander in Iraq directly told him “
we need more troops
.”
Around the same time
, Gates told Casey he was being replaced and offered him the top job of Army chief of staff.

After it was announced that he would be replacing Casey, Petraeus called Odierno to ask him what his recommendation was on troop levels. Odierno told him that he should bring in
all five brigades as soon as possible
. “A blind man on a dark night could see that there was no alternative,” recalled Petraeus, who had been watching the failure of Iraqi security services to hold cleared neighborhoods for years.

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, however, was concerned about the political implications of having five new American brigades arrive in Iraq and was pushing for two, the same number that Casey was in favor of. McGurk recalls, “The president said something to the effect of ‘Goddammit,
does this guy want to win or not
? If he wants to win, I’m with him. But if he doesn’t wanna win, what’s the point?’” Bush spoke to Maliki in one of his many one-on-one videoconferences with the Iraqi prime minister, who eventually agreed to the five additional brigades.

Never an accomplished orator, President Bush announced
the new surge
of
twenty thousand soldiers
in an especially wooden speech to the American public from the White House library on January 10, 2007. Almost four years after the invasion of Iraq and with some three thousand American soldiers now in their graves, he publicly acknowledged for the first time that all had not gone according to plan and that he had played a role in the decisions that had wrecked Iraq: “Where mistakes have been made, the responsibility lies with me.”

Immediately after the speech, the junior senator from Illinois, Barack Obama, went on MSNBC to say, “
I am not persuaded
that the 20,000 additional troops in Iraq is going to solve the sectarian violence there. In fact, it will do the reverse. I think it takes the pressure off the Iraqis to make the sort of political accommodations that every observer believes is the ultimate solution to the problems we face there. So I’m going to actively oppose the president’s proposal.” Obama was joined in his opposition to the surge by more
or less the entire Democratic Party
, including then-Senator Joe Biden and much of the foreign policy establishment on both sides of the aisle who felt that Bush was doubling down on a bad bet. Republican Senator Chuck Hagel described the escalation as “the
most dangerous foreign policy blunder
in this country since Vietnam.”
A survey
of “100 of America’s most respected foreign policy experts” by
Foreign Policy
magazine eight months after the surge was announced found that more than half thought the surge was having a “negative impact” on the war. Most Americans were also against the surge: a poll the day after Bush made his surge announcement found that 61 percent opposed sending more troops to Iraq.